


the heaviest faults

by TheoMiller



Category: Fantastic Four (2015)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, During Canon, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Relationships, Forgiveness, Gen, M/M, Poor Life Choices, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Reed Richards' Fantastic One Year Time Skip Solo Road Trip, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 06:29:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7704052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheoMiller/pseuds/TheoMiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The road from that garage in Oyster Bay to the Franklin Storm Research Institute in Central City is a long one, but it's not the whole journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Icarus

**Author's Note:**

> fuck. fuck, this fic is actually not finished yet, but I'm going to post this first chapter as a gesture of good will and also so you guys can come nudge me into finishing it BECAUSE IT IS OFFICIALLY OVER 50,000 WORDS AND STILL PLUGGING ALONG #LETMEDIE.

_"But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive."_

-Randall Munroe

 

**OCTOBER 14, 2007 – Oyster Bay, NY:**

Ben knocks on the Richards' door the day Reed's grounding is over. "Hi," he says, when Reed's mother opens the door with a frown on her face.

"Hello," she says, frowning down at him like she's never seen a ten year old boy before.

"I'm here to see Reed," he says.

She stares at him so long he's half-certain he's got the wrong house, but he knows that garage door. He saw Reed Richards _teleport_ something in that garage. Then she leans back inside the house and calls, "REED!" over her shoulder.

There's a series of loud thumping noises, and then Reed appears, breathless, behind her. His eyes widen as he looks at Ben.

"Hi," Ben says again. "Do you wanna hang out?"

Reed approaches the door slowly, and his mother stands just beyond the doorway, arms folded, frowning. "Hang out?" he echoes. "Doing what?"

Ben's not entirely sure, to be quite honest; he'd hung out with people before, tossing baseballs around or going to the movies or bowling – it doesn't seem to have a set definition. But he also doesn't think any of those things are going to interest Reed, so he straightens up a bit and says boldly, "We could walk down to the library and get ice cream cones on the way."

He has two dollars and seventy-seven cents in his wallet. That should be enough for ice cream.

"Okay," says Reed. "I'll put my shoes on."

But Reed's mom is frowning. "You can't take ice cream cones into the library, Reed," she says, disapprovingly.

"We'll eat them outside on the benches by the park," says Ben.

"It'll keep him out of the garage," someone calls from inside the house.

Ben tries to look innocent when Reed's mother turns her scrutinizing gaze back to him. Then, "Oh, all right," she says, with a sigh.

Ben does his very best to keep a straight face, and does not dare to punch the air in success until the door closes behind Reed, who still looks rather bemused by the fact that Ben is here.

He’s just going to have to convince Reed that he’s here to stay, then.

-

**NOVEMBER 2, 2007 – Oyster Bay, NY:**

The flathead thing is not a fluke. Reed knows nothing about tools. Ben could understand him not knowing a damn thing about parts – proven by the fact that he'd said power converter and then pointed at a pole-mount transformer. But he's built all this, and he still can't figure out which screwdriver to use.

Reed also knows nothing about building. He's trying to put a screw through sheetrock without putting an anchor in first.

"That's not – no, you can't do that, Reed, you have to anchor it."

Ben is eleven and Reed is ten and it's been three months. He's starting to think Reed might be his best friend. Ben is fairly new to best friends, but he understands the concept.

He takes a breath and counts to five like his Ma taught him and then he feels better. Less annoyed with Reed, who hasn't done anything wrong and doesn't deserve Ben snapping at him. "I'll do it for you," he says. "You can futz around with whatever else, or watch me do it so you can try it yourself next time?"

"Okay," says Reed, and apparently chooses to watch Ben work.

It’s mostly quiet, until Reed says, “So your mom taught you this?”

“Yeah, mainly,” says Ben, wondering how it is that Reed doesn’t know about his dad. Everyone in their school had known for a while there.

“I wish my mother knew about this kind of thing,” says Reed wistfully.

“I don’t like your parents very much,” Ben confesses, and then regrets it.

Reed doesn’t get angry. He just keeps watching him work.

Ben keeps going, because clearly he has no sense, and he needs to fill this awful silence. “I mean, I know they’re your folks, so you must love them, but—they treat you kinda like the people at school do. And it’s one thing for strangers to be like that, and it’s bad that people at school are rude to you, but it’s even worse that you have to deal with that at home, especially after dealing with it all day at school.”

“This place has never felt like home,” says Reed. “Is that—that’s dumb. Sorry.”

Ben stares hard at the anchor. He loves his family even if his brother is kind of mean and his mom can’t spend much time with him but—he thinks Reed is his home, in a weird, complicated way. Best friends are kind of funny like that.

“You’ll find somewhere,” Ben says. “You’re going to find a place where everyone can appreciate how brilliant you are, where there are lots of people who like you, and—”

And it’s going to be away from Ben. But it’s okay. They’re going to get houses next door to each other and build a pool across both of their backyards and hang out all the time even when they’re both married.

“Do you really think so?”

“Yeah,” says Ben. “I know so.”

-

**JANUARY 8, 2008 – Oyster Bay, NY:**

Ben doesn’t stop coming over.

Reed walks home from the bus stop with Ben every day. Every Sunday afternoon, they go to the library. They sit together in class and Mr. Kenny watches them with narrowed eyes but Ben doesn’t try to talk to Reed during class. They sit quietly, and when they do talk, Ben is patient: Reed realizes too late a few times that he’s been talking too long, but Ben just shrugs, tells him he’s more interesting to listen to than Mr. Kenny.

He doesn’t know how to keep Ben around, but he does know that he desperately wants to keep him, so he tries to pinpoint what it is that Ben wants, or what he’s looking for, or what he sees in Reed. He studies up on boring subjects like Latin and English literature, and weird things like necropsies and Aztec sacrifice, and tells Ben everything he’s learned the next day. It doesn’t seem to matter. Ben listens, occasionally asking questions, usually content to just sit there and listen to Reed ramble. Even about the various uses of the ablative case, or the possibly substantiated rumors of ritual human sacrifice in Ancient Carthage.

Sherlock Holmes says that when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is likely the truth. It’s sound scientific logic, albeit slow-moving. The dismissal of certain conclusions based on clearly contradictory data is part of the scientific process after all. And when he asks Ben why he doesn’t mind Reed talking about weird stuff, Ben just shrugs and says they’re friends, and he likes to learn.

Friends. Verbal confirmation now exists. They’re friends. So Reed has to figure he’s doing something right.

They wander around town sometimes, just talking and scuffing their shoes on the concrete. Sometimes they play video games. Or Reed tries to teach Ben chess, and Ben tries to teach Reed to pitch, and they’re both bad at it.

But then there are the days where Ben invites Reed over to stay the night, and those are the very best. Reed goes to Ben’s house right after school on Friday afternoons and he helps in the salvage yard and then Mrs. Grimm makes dinner. Jimmy is sometimes rude but Mrs. Grimm is awesome, for an adult, and she lets them have pretty much free reign of the scrap yard for the night.

Those nights, Reed treasures, storing them away in his head just in case it all ends too soon.

They wander, Reed pointing out things he’s used for experiments, Ben explaining things Reed doesn’t recognize, or showing him the insides of cars there. There’s always something new. The dogs follow them - Reed’s not quite sure about the dogs yet but Ben adores them and that’s enough for him - and when they’re tired and they climb up to sit on the hood of a car, the dogs stretch out on the ground beside the car and wait for them.

“Do you think there’s life out there?”

Reed doesn’t understand for a second, but then he follows Ben’s gaze—Jupiter is visible in the dusk sky, alongside a faint crescent of the moon. “It would be statistically improbable for there not to be life out there somewhere,” he says. “It’s also really likely that there’s other life within our own solar system, even, probably. Just probably not life in any way similar to humans. Protozoa and archaebacteria and cyanobacteria.”

“I want to see that, it my lifetime,” says Ben. “Finding other life out there.”

“Once we get a hang of teleportation on Earth, we could probably start looking at teleporting to other planets,” says Reed, thoughtfully.

“I’d want to go to a different planet,” Ben tells him.

Reed is too busy thinking to reply at first. It’s never occurred to him that he could possibly go to space with the teleporter. Space would be awesome. He’s wanted to go to space since he first saw the grainy footage of Neil Armstrong planting a flag. He’s pictured building a rocket, sometimes, like the Nautilus, and exploring space with Ben like in Star Trek. But he wouldn’t even need a rocket! He could be the first person to teleport and the first person on Mars.

He realizes he’s been quiet for too long and wants to kick himself. The guidance counselors and teachers and his mom keep saying he has to reply to people, even when he doesn’t want to, because it’s polite. He doesn’t want to be rude to Ben and make Ben leave.

“Why do you want to go to space?” The words trip over themselves in his haste to rectify the silence, but Ben doesn’t seem annoyed. He’s still squinting at Jupiter.

“I want to see different stars,” he says. “I want to see what their stars look like on nights like this.”

“I don’t know how many planets you can see stars from like we can. Earth has a unique atmosphere,” Reed says.

“It’ll still be a different sky.”

Reed is starting to think Ben might want to get out of this town just as much as Reed does. “We’ll go someday, then,” he says.

Ben’s answering smile is all the confirmation Reed needs.

**-**

**APRIL 19, 2008 – Oyster Bay, NY:**

"Whoa, hey," Ben says, when Reed sits upright with a terrified gasp. "Reed? You awake?" He adds, because he doesn't seem very aware of his surroundings.

Reed shakes his head as if to clear it, and then fumbles for his glasses in the dark. His hair is sticking up a bit in the back. "Ben," he says. "Oh."

"Did you have a nightmare?" Prompts Ben.

"A lion came through my teleporter," says Reed, frowning. "I hope that isn't actually possible. My mom would be mad if I let a lion in the garage."

Ben shakes his head. "Your mom would be the least of your worries."

"Really?"

"Yeah. You'd have to deal with my angry ghost if you got me eaten by a lion."

"There's no such thing as ghosts."

"I'd still haunt you," Ben says, decisively, like it's settled. And it works, because Reed just frowns and lies back down, glasses still on.

Then - "Ben?"

"Yeah?"

"I think I would prefer your living company."

"...Okay," says Ben.

Reed rolls onto his side, expression serious in the moonlight. "If a lion comes through my teleporter, I want you to run and not get eaten."

"Dude, a lion is not gonna come through the teleporter. Go back to sleep."

"I can't," Reed says. "The nightmare caused my adrenals to flood my body with epinephrine."

Ben groans and sits up. "All right. Don't laugh, but whenever I got nightmares, my ma would let me sleep in her bed, so I knew there was someone there."

"...I don't think my mother would be amenable to that."

"No," agrees Ben, because he's noticed the distance between Reed and his mom, "but I could."

"Oh."

He's about to apologize for suggesting it when Reed slides closer to the wall and pulls his pillow along with him. "Okay," Ben says. "Cool."

He climbs into the small bed beside Reed, and then pauses before he lays down. "Do you have enough room?"

"Yeah," says Reed, "it's fine."

Ben settles in, flat on his back with his shoulder pressed against Reed's. He usually sleeps like this, looking up at the glow in the dark stars on Reed's ceiling or the cracks in his own bedroom ceiling's paint, but Reed's rabbit-like heart thumping a mile a minute, and his shallow breaths, are new and strange. "You're still wearing your glasses," he whispers.

Reed passes them to him, wordless, and Ben puts them on the bedside table. "What're adrenals?" Ben asks.

"The adrenal glands are a part of the endocrine system responsible for releasing the hormones most commonly associated with the fight or flight response."

"So, fear, then?"

"Yeah," says Reed. "Fear."

The next time Ben comes over, he puts his pillow down at the foot of the bed and sleeps there instead of the floor. Reed only kicks him in the chin a couple times.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [clawing my way out of a grave] I'M BACK

_"Starting today, you will enter a new element, you will see what no man has ever seen before (for my men and I no longer count); and our planet, through my efforts, will deliver up its last secrets."  
_ \- Jules Verne

 

**AUGUST 11, 2012 - OYSTER BAY, NY**

"Dude, I can't hear the radio over your equations. Talk a language I understand, or quiet down so I can listen to music."

Reed scowls at him in the corner of his vision, and Ben sighs. It's not his fault that they didn't find the relay Reed needed at the junkyard. And, actually, it's Ben who should be pissed, he's the one who drove all the way out here for nothing. If Reed would get a job, with someone in town who didn't know his propensity for causing explosions, implosions, and power surges, and actually show up instead of getting lost in his usual mental haze, and do his AP homework... with his time machine, okay, fine, Ben knows it's irrational. Reed can't have a normal job like Ben can. And the idea of Reed driving is... terrifying.

"Numbers are English, Ben," says Reed. "If you'd taken a math past Algebra, you'd be able to keep up with at least some basic differential equations."

"I'll take as many fancy math classes as you'd like, just as soon as you join the baseball team."

Reed goes silent at that - 1 Grimm, 0 Richards - but then punches the off button on the radio, which means he probably has a rebuttal, and has chosen speaking English over shutting up.

"What?" Says Ben. "Don't tell me you actually are considering joining the team. You'll break your glasses, and Math Analysis will tank my GPA."

"I saw you kissing Abigail Evans," says Reed.

Ben's hands tighten on the wheel. "You know I date. You've interrupted my dates, in fact."

"You always tell me when you're dating someone."

"Yeah, and then you crash my dates. And it's not like I lied, Reed. I just. Didn't mention it."

Because if given the choice between a girl and Reed, he was always gonna choose Reed. And not only was that disquieting in its own right, because he really did like them, but... "I worry, sometimes, that. You don't like me dating, because I spend less time with you, and I'm your best friend."

Reed huffs a laugh. "You can say only friend. It doesn't bother me."

"Fine, only and best friend. I just. Don't want you to get jealous - not of, like, the girls! But of the time I'm spending with them and not you."

"Of course not," says Reed. "I catch up on my reading when you're not there."

"Oh, am I a distraction from your attempts to read the entirety of the county library?" Ben teases.

Reed doesn't reply. Then, "So you're not ashamed of me?" He asks in a small voice.

Ben tears his eyes away from the road to stare at his friend. "Are you insane?"

"According to some," Reed says. It's a joke, but Ben isn't going to let Reed out of talking about this just because he's finally grasped the concept of lightening serious conversations with levity.

"Reed. You are my best friend. I'm more likely to brag to the girls I'm dating that my best friend is a genius than I am to try and act like I don't know you."

"You tell Abigail Evans about me?"

"Of course," says Ben. Then he pauses. "Wait, you don't have, like, a thing for her, do you?"

"No," Reed says. "I'm not interested in Abigail."

“Because if you were, I’d stop seeing her, I won’t do that to you.”

Reed rolls his eyes. “I’m not interested in Abigail, Ben.”

“I’m just saying. If you ever like someone I’m dating, just let me know, I don’t want bad blood between us. Actually—wait, Reed, have you ever liked anyone?”

“No one really talks to me.”

Ben winces. “Don’t worry,” he says firmly. “You’re gonna meet a nice girl. Hot, too. And smart enough to give you a run for your money, maybe even smarter than you, girls tend to be smart.”

“There’s absolutely no empirical evidence that intelligence and gender have any—”

Reed is cut off by the deer that leaps in front of the truck. Ben slams on his brakes, flinging one arm out across Reed’s chest, and yanks the wheel to avoid it.

They miss the deer. Not so much the ditch beside the road.

* * *

**AUGUST 11, 2012 - OYSTER BAY, NY**

Reed wakes up with a dry mouth, a throbbing headache, and no idea where Ben is. It’s not a good combination. He flops a hand out of bed to seek out his glasses, but instead of his bedside table, he finds open air, and a weird tugging feeling in his hand. He holds it in front of his face - there’s a tube taped to the back of his hand.

IV, his aching head provides after a moment. It’s then that he registers the smell of antiseptic and plastic - from the oxygen cannulaE in his nose - and the faint crinkling of the plastic covering on the mattress. He’s in the hospital.

He sits up, panic making his heart race and the monitor blare. “Ben!” he calls.

“Oh, oh, hey, no, be careful,” someone says. He squints at the person - not Ben - and swats ineffectually at them. “Mr. Richards! Your friend is fine.”

“Ben?” he says, and narrows his eyes at the source of the voice. It’s a young man in red scrubs. “Ben’s okay?”

“He’s fine,” repeats the nurse.

“Where?”

The nurse presses him back into the bed when he tries to climb out. “Mr. Richards, you have a concussion, you will not help your friend by falling on your face.”

“I want to see Ben,” he repeats.

“Mr. Richards, lie down,” says the nurse.

“It’s okay,” Ben says, and the nurse groans as Reed sits back up. Ben steps into view, and the slight fuzz around the shape solidifies into Ben as he approaches the bed. “Hey, buddy.”

There’s a butterfly bandage on Ben’s forehead, and a few scratches from the glass, but he’s fine otherwise, and Reed lets out a sigh and sits back. “You’re okay.”

“I told you that,” the nurse says. “Ben, I’m guessing? Look, make sure he doesn’t try to get up. Your friend has a concussion.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve been talking to the nurse in charge of discharge paperwork, she gave me a bunch of pamphlets and stuff.”

“Doesn’t that usually go to the parents?”

“I’m sure they’ll get their own copies when they get here.” Ben drags a chair over. “Don’t worry, Nurse Cary, I’ll keep an eye on him, you go take care of your other patients.”

* * *

**AUGUST 14, 2012 - OYSTER BAY, NY**

**"Ben," says Reed. He blinks owlishly, like he's just woken up. "What are you doing here?"**

"Your mom asked me to check on you while she was at work. You do know you're not supposed to sleep with a concussion when no one's here to keep an eye on you, right?"

"I set up an alarm system that sends an e-mail to my mother to call if don't turn it off in five minutes of the alarm going off at steadily louder intervals."

Ben laughs. "Of course you did."

"You don't have to stay," Reed says. “I’m on bed rest. Mom locked the garage, so I can’t even do experiments.”

Ben reaches over to tilt Reed’s head back and get a better look at the bruise on his forehead. “Jeez, it looks even worse now,” he says. It was red and purple in the hospital, but had faded into harsher yellows.

“Thanks,” says Reed, flatly, and Ben rolls his eyes.

“You know what I mean,” he says.

“I do,” agrees Reed, and then he pauses and says, “are you planning to let go of my chin any time soon?”

Ben blinks. “I—yeah, I totally forgot I was still doing that,” he says, and drops his hand to his side.

“Did you get evaluated for concussion?” Reed asks.

“Yeah. I’m fine, though. Thick skull, and all that. Not to mention, you were on the side that went into the ditch first. I’m really sorry about that, Reed, I just—”

“It’s not your fault that a deer felt the need to cross the road,” says Reed. He’s always the best at making Ben feel better, because he doesn’t say empty words like ‘it’s okay’, he just says things that are totally true, so Ben can’t argue. It’s the greatest. “Besides,” Reed continues, “if you hadn’t swerved, it was likely the deer would’ve come through the windshield. A large animal with flailing hooves is a great deal more dangerous than a stationary stretch of earth.”

Ben grins at him. “You’re using a lot of big words for a concussion patient, buddy.”

“Please,” scoffs Reed, “if I wanted to confound you with polysyllabic words, ‘stationary’ wouldn’t even make the list.”

So they hang out on the couch and watch some documentary about how science is expected to advance in the next few years, and Reed whines about the rampant speculation about the future, which no-one can possibly predict, Ben! until he dozes off with his head on a pillow in Ben’s lap, his legs thrown over the armrest because he’s too damned tall, taller than Ben already.

Ben combs his hands through Reed’s hair as the other boy dozes off and tries to picture the future. It’s hard. Reed’s still the same person he was when they were ten years old and stealing scraps. The only difference is that now they’re now seventeen and trading scraps for other scraps.

Reed talks about the future with bright eyes and gesturing, and Ben’s vague idea of them recording their adventures jumping from here to the desert and back again in order to publish the results… well, his concept of the future doesn’t go much further than that.

He tries to picture Reed grown up. Will he get married and have kids? Will he get a sensible minivan instead of riding everywhere in Ben’s truck? Will Ben get married? He can’t make an image form in his head.

Maybe Reed’s right. No-one can predict the future. But maybe Ben called it seven years ago when he said that Reed was going to find somewhere where he belonged. Ben’s seen him at work, knows how brilliant he is. It seems like just a matter of time until someone besides Ben, someone more capable of giving Reed what he wants, figures it out too.

Ben shakes his head. “Maybe I do have a concussion,” he mutters, and switches to the History Channel, now that Reed’s not awake to complain.

* * *

 

**AUGUST 20, 2013 - OYSTER BAY, NY**

**Helping Reed pack is the worst thing Ben has ever done. It feels like admitting defeat, and he's spent the better part of his life defying modern science in a suburban garage. Admitting defeat isn't something he's all that used to.**

Reed is oblivious, rambling about the Baxter Institute's amenities. "The library is so big that the section with scientific periodicals is built with all the shelves on motorized tracks, so only a few shelves are accessible at a time. It lets them put more books per square foot of floor space. It's like the Edward E Brickell Medical Sciences library, all of the UVA libraries, all six MIT libraries, and the Radcliffe Science Library combined. I think they even have books bound in human skin, like Harvard, which is—”

Ben slams the drawers on Reed’s dresser shut a little louder than he intends, and Reed breaks off. “I wish you were coming with me,” Reed says quietly.

 _I wish you were staying_. “Nah,” says Ben. “What would I do in a library like that?”

“They have other stuff,” Reed says. “There’s eight copies of _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_ , just in English, there are two in the original French too.”

“You have your own copy,” Ben points out. He would know; he’s the one who gave it to Reed. It was the first time he’d ever given someone a Christmas gift, and it had been terribly weird, because he felt like an outsider on the holiday, even if Reed assured him it was terribly secularized, and that Joshua of Nazareth had likely been born in April. Reed had hugged the book to his chest and demanded Ben drive him to the mall right then, so he could buy Ben a better gift, because he didn’t think the baseball glove he’d dropped off on the first day of Chanukah would cut it. The book was bound in leather, with a pattern of gold whales, and it’d cost more than Ben wants to mention to Reed to get it and have it shipped fast enough for Christmas.

“I don’t want to ruin the spine on that copy by reading it too much,” says Reed. “I want it to be the first book on the shelf of my office when I get my own place someday.”

Ben’s stomach twists weirdly—he’s torn between being pleased by the idea of that book being Reed’s favorite possession, next to his brain, and wanting to be sick at the idea of Reed living alone in some big city with an office full of first edition textbooks, while Ben stays in Oyster Bay the rest of his life.

He picks up the box of Reed’s clothes. “Come on,” he says, past the thick feeling in the back of his throat. “We’ll hit traffic if we don’t leave soon.”

* * *

**AUGUST 20, 2013 - NEW YORK, NY**

“Don’t let any of these scientists push you around,” says Ben. What he means is, _I’m worried about you out here all alone_ and maybe _Give me an excuse to come here and see you_.

“If they do,” Reed says, “I know who to call.”

It’s reassurance, even if Reed has no idea that it is, that Reed is going to keep having faith in Ben even when he’s forty minutes away. It’s not perfect, keeping an eye on Reed from afar, but it’s what Ben has. And he’d like to think he’s done his part - he’s gotten Reed this far.

Reed’s brilliant. He can do this, without Ben, and the pride he feels at that drowns out the twinge of pain at the idea that Reed doesn’t need him anymore. No more scrap yards, no more driving, no more encouragement.

Ben claps Reed on the shoulder before he leaves, because he goes in for a hug and then decides halfway through that it’d be weird.

Leaving, he decides, on the way back to Oyster Bay, is even worse than helping Reed pack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [rubs hands together] i've split them up. welcome to hell.
> 
> also i can't believe chapter two came together with literally just 150 words. that's it. 150 words and it was ready to post. ffs.


End file.
